This year’s 30th Alliance Francaise French Film Festival returns to Palace Cinemas in Brisbane from 14 March and is set to spoil cinephiles with a cultural foie gras offilm. From the opening night with Audrey Tautou in The Trouble With You, to a special Australian premiere of the fully restored 1963, Last Year at Marienbad, the festival also offers Cannes’, Sink or Swim.

One particular plat principal on offer is French filmmaker, Jacques Audiard’s first English-language film, The Sisters Brothers. Lauded as the Australian festival-only premier, this film based on the award-winning novel, is set in the 1850s Californian Gold Rush. Eli and Charlie Sisters, (John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix) are cold-blooded hitmen brothers in the employ of a wealthy baron known only as the Commodore who tasks them with the job of hunting down a man called Hermann Warm (Riz Ahmed), a chemist who’s allegedly perfected a formula, which causes gold-bearing rock to illuminate in water.

Meanwhile Warm is also being tracked by John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) a henchman also in the pay of the Commodore, however the two men strike up an unexpected alliance and Morris defects with Warm to build a utopian society in Texas. The film is premised on this game of cat and mouse, however the plot takes an unprecedented twist remarkable of western film genre.

John C. Reilly is well cast as the brother eager to retire from their line of work, and he’s up against Phoenix, commanding and severe, who’s keenly settled on pursuing his career criminal aspirations. As hardened outlaws typical of the dry, uninhabitable terrain of the much-trod western, their masculinities are starkly juxtaposed against the gentle, emotionally intelligent, intelligentsia of Gyllenhaal and Ahmed. Although Gyllenhaal is miscast, both men provide a fresh reprieve from the harsh cruelty of the world this film is at pains to create and discern itself from.

Production design and costuming handsomely portray this period piece, especially the rendering of 1851 San Francisco, and while cinematography is at times too dark and moody, this adds to the film’s off-beat nuance. Oscar-winning composer, Alexandre Desplat provides a peculiar score to the film, which doesn’t exactly land, but reconceptualises the western genre music score so entrenched by Ennio Morricone’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly score.

While there’s some dark humour in the idiosyncrasies, this is all ultimately weighed down by the mean-spirited misery the characters must endure, and what is left is a sombre and unpleasant film filled with dying horses, spider bites, limb amputations and all the horrors of the west. With themes including American progress, camaraderie and the promise of Utopia, Director Audiard imbues this outwardly American tale with his contemporary European film making sensibilities, and while still painting with a Hollywood palette of red, white and blue, he has created something new and exciting, which isn’t completely lost in the doldrums.